Reviews of Kafka, Celery, and ZeroMQ

How developers use Kafka vs Celery vs ZeroMQ

Front-end messages are logged to Kafka by our API and application servers. We have batch processing (on the middle-left) and real-time processing (on the middle-right) pipelines to process the experiment data. For batch processing, after daily raw log get to s3, we start our nightly experiment workflow to figure out experiment users groups and experiment metrics. We use our in-house workflow management system Pinball to manage the dependencies of all these MapReduce jobs.

All of our background jobs (e.g., image resizing, file uploading, email and SMS sending) are done through Celery (using Redis as its broker). Celery's scheduling and retrying features are especially useful for error-prone tasks, such as email and SMS sending.

For orchestrating the creation of the correct number of instances, managing errors and retries, and finally managing the deallocation of resources we use RabbitMQ in conjunction with the Celery Project framework, along with a self-developed workflow engine.